On December 18, 2025, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. announced a decisive move to roll back the Biden-era embrace of gender-transition interventions for children, unveiling proposed rules that would bar hospitals from performing sex-rejecting procedures on minors as a condition of participating in Medicare and Medicaid. This is not bureaucratic tinkering — it is a sweeping attempt to end federal sponsorship of what many conservatives have long called experimental and irreversible treatments for children.
The rules laid out by HHS would also strip Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Program of coverage for gender-affirming care for those under 18, a change that would cut off federal funding streams that have enabled these practices to spread. Nearly every hospital depends on Medicare and Medicaid payments, so this move would instantly change the incentives for institutions that have been pressured by activists and previously permissive federal policy.
Secretary Kennedy framed the action as a protection of children, signing a declaration grounded in an HHS peer-reviewed review that concluded puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and surgeries do not meet recognized standards of care for minors. Conservatives should applaud an administration that finally treats children as children and prioritizes long-term health over fads in ideological medicine. The days of federal agencies forcing identity politics into bedside medicine are being challenged, and that is a righteous course correction.
Predictably, the left and a chorus of medical activists are preparing lawsuits and furious press releases, and courts will likely become the next battleground. The proposed rules must still go through a formal rulemaking process with public comment periods, and opponents will use every legal tactic to delay or derail enforcement — a fight conservatives must be ready to win in both the courts and the court of public opinion.
The reaction from establishment medical groups has been swift and angry, with organizations like the American Academy of Pediatrics clashing with HHS over the science and the new policy posture; that clash only underscores how politicized medicine has become. Washington’s scientific elite have too often substituted moral certainty for humility, and defunding or reforming capture within these institutions is necessary when ideology endangers children.
This administration’s move is a reminder that conservative principles — protecting the innocent, defending parental rights, and restoring common sense to public policy — can still prevail when leaders have the courage to act. Americans who care about the future of their children should stand with Secretary Kennedy and HHS in demanding that medicine be guided by evidence, prudence, and the protection of youth, not by political fashion or activist pressure.
